Defiance of the Fall

Chapter 1461: Cultivation Path

The rushed steps of two cultivators drew Zacʼs attention. Judging by their attire, they were fellow trial takers. They werenʼt the first ones Zac had spotted since his return. Even with dozens of trialtakers being killed in the Rapture Observatory, there was no lack of new arrivals. In fact, Zac had already seen more trialtakers in Hollow Court than in Mercurial Court.

It wasnʼt without reason. For one, heʼd stayed in the depths of Mercurial Court over the past months, a place no other Sealbearer could reach. Secondly, the ever-changing nature of Mercurial Courtʼs citadel made it unlikely to run into people—at least real ones. Meanwhile, Hollow Courtʼs major facilities were clumped together around the welcoming square.

Zac couldnʼt discern their origins, making it impossible to say whether the two were enemies or simply the competition. It didnʼt matter to Zac, and he didnʼt follow them to investigate. He had nothing to gain from going on a rampage at the moment. He was annoyed with the Pesvati Rift after they sent all those enemies to his doorstep, but it did allow him to deal with most of his enemies in one swoop.

He leaned toward letting bygones be bygones, staying out of their hair as long as the rift extended the same courtesy. For better or worse, the Pesvati mark heʼd kept for a rainy day was utterly annihilated when he dealt with the Primoʼs eye. It simply couldnʼt withstand the surge of Apocalyptic Death. It didnʼt really matter. Heʼd kept it in case he needed it to quickly reach the Left Imperial Palace, and a proper route had already been arranged.

The Grand Libraryʼs protective array swept through Zac as he passed through the lofty arches. Like a small creature with its tail stepped on, a secondary, much weaker fluctuation came from within his spatial ring. Zac infused a mental tendril into the Spatial Tool, confirming that the jade box remained sealed and the talismans placed on it were intact.

Fuxiʼs unexpected appearance had undeniably overshadowed Zacʼs original reason for picking Jikasiʼs lantern. The soulful ripples Zac had sensed back then had nothing to do with the ancient sage, but rather the Supreme Pill that had been refined in the nurturing bed for millions upon millions of years. The pill had successfully left the dream with him, and it had been struggling to break free from its bonds since Zac emerged.

Each clash against its prison made Zac more fearful that the pill would damage itself in its mindless desire for freedom. Worse, Zac could tell that the pill was much like Natural Treasures bound to a specific locale. Now that it had been removed from the nurturing bed, it was slowly losing its unique spirituality.

Consuming the pill would naturally solve the problem, and his body was clamoring to do just that. Still, Zac kept his hunger in check. If all worked out, he planned on taking the pill after reaching the Left Imperial Palace. It would be a much-needed boost to his soul, which had seen very little focused cultivation over the past few years.

Most of his recent gains in Soul Strength came from the tempering of life-and-death battles and various Natural Treasures heʼd picked up during his travels. That kind of growth had left his soul stronger, but it had also weakened the intensity of his Life-Death attunement. Luckily, the unexpected relocation of his Soul Aperture had mostly solved that issue for him. Zac didnʼt even need to rotate [Void Emperor Apotheosis], and the emanations of his Cosmic Core still painted his Soul Cores in the correct alignment.

Even so, two hurdles remained before Zac dared to take the pill. The first was finding a method to subdue the Pill Spirit. This kind of pill was beyond anything Zac had eaten before. Its spirituality lacked the sapience of Verun or Haro, but it surpassed them both in raw strength. More importantly, it was a Pill Spirit born from nature, rather than one nurtured by a skilled Alchemist. A manufactured Pill Spirit wouldnʼt resist being consumed; that was its lifeʼs purpose.
A natural spirit like the one inside the unnamed pill was more like a force of nature that would fight tooth and nail to survive. Zac had seen the outcome of losing that fight. In Jikasiʼs original memory, the pill had ripped open a hole in his stomach and escaped after sacrificing a chunk of its energy. Unable to fly upward, the pill had continued down the spatial tunnel.

As to where that tunnel led, Zac had an educated guess. It was hidden deeply, but Zac suspected the unique spiritual fluctuations inside the Methele ruins came from the First Garden. This unique Dao of Life had fused with the Metheleʼs soul-nurturing bed to give birth to the Pill Spirit. In fact, the Metheleʼs heritage could very well be linked to the First Garden from the get-go.

Their ruins had no doubt popped up in the Left Imperial Expanse as a result of Hollow Court connecting the gardens and hells to the continent. The bridge wasnʼt completely stable, as evidenced by the crack leading to Ninth Hell.

Zac was sure he could overpower the ancient pill if it came down to it. If there was one thing he was confident in, it was his ability to eat and safely digest all manners of spiritual objects. However, outright destroying the Pill Spirit through force would not only exhaust a large amount of medicinal efficacy, it would deprive him of the benefits that would come from absorbing the spirituality.

The latter was the most valuable part of a unique pill, just like how the Tool Spirit was the most important part of a Spirit Tool. Without the spirit, a weapon was just a dead item, like the temporary axes heʼd bought. He needed to figure out a way to absorb the pill without it putting up a fight.

The good news was that the pillʼs powerful spirituality worked in its favor. While it couldnʼt prevent its decline entirely, it instinctively resisted any loss of medicinal efficacy. That would buy Zac enough time to research countermeasures and arrange everything else.

Zac continued through a wide corridor, passing study rooms and galleries housing spiritual artworks. While the library only looked like a decently large palace from the outside, its interiors were the size of a city. Soon enough, Zac arrived at what looked like a replica of the Hollow Chasm. There were a full eighty-one terraced levels filled with bookcases.

The uppermost terraces were the largest, and they were accessible to any disciple of the Hollow Court, even Servant Disciples. Increasingly powerful restrictions covered the bookshelves the further you went down. While free to read, accessing the books had certain requirements. For instance, only Monarchs could access the three terraces closest to the floor, which naturally held the most valuable scriptures. Everyone else could only look on enviously from afar.

The huge empty space in the chamberʼs center wasnʼt a no-manʼs land like the Hollow Chasm. Instead, there were thousands of floating disks. Some were covered in opaque privacy arrays, meaning they were occupied. On others, disciples were sitting in plain view with their noses in a book or their eyes closed while holding onto an Information Jade. There were even some disciples simply floating in place while studying.

While the books inside the open repository were free to read, they couldnʼt be brought out of the chasm. As such, some cultivators could spend weeks, even months, without leaving the library.

Zac took in the scene before floating toward the floor at the bottom. While the space was much smaller than the topmost levels, the floor was significantly larger than the narrow disk at the bottom of the Hollow Chasm.

Eighty-one steles took up most of the space. Zac infused his mental energy into one at random, and countless book titles with short descriptions filled his mind. Even with a brain as fast as a supercomputer, it would take Zac days to go through everything. Furthermore, each pillar only covered the title of a specific floor, making the task of finding what one needed even more arduous.

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Not willing to waste his time, Zac walked over to the manned desk that took up the rest of the floorʼs free space. After paying 50 Longanimity, a librarian helped him identify the location of twenty-odd scriptures that might have the information he needed. Zac directly flew up to the thirty-fourth terrace, which mainly housed dissertations related to the soul. He found the first tome without issue and immersed himself in his studies.

Rather than researching spirits, Zacʼs focus was actually [Nine Reincarnations Manual]. Zac could directly consume the pill without subduing the Pill Spirit if need be, even if it was wasteful. But without a working soul-nurturing method, the pill may as well be poison.

Thanks to his encounters inside the trial, his soul was already approaching the upper bounds of [Nine Reincarnations Manual]ʼs fourth layer. The pill would be more than enough to push him across the finish line. Except, if he hadnʼt figured out what waited beyond, the finish line would become a deadly cliff.

In this regard, Fuxi could be considered his guardian angel, appearing when he was needed the most. Zac had already glimpsed a possible upgrade to [Nine Reincarnations Manual] in the complex array that connected Fuxi Halls and the Rapture Observatory. The movements on those floating pillars had been based on a mutually restricting and empowering relationship between the hells and gardens, which could be further boiled down to the Daos of Life and Death.

Translating the concepts of Hollow Courtʼs bridge into a soul cultivation manual had at first seemed like a task that would take years. At the very least, he would have needed a huge amount of Ultomʼs enlightenment to draw the necessary connections—and that was after entering the initial threshold of the [Grand Unity Mantra]. However, with enough knowledge to work from, one didnʼt even need an epiphany to create a working manual.

It was precisely this knowledge that Zac had targeted in Fuxiʼs Unity Library. The star had focused on the unity of Life and Death and theoretical pathways leading to Chaos. While the latter was experimental or fully theoretical in nature while the Peak of Chaos remained incomplete, the knowledge could be used to improve various methods utilizing those Daos.

With Fuxiʼs knowledge directly made Zacʼs own, he already had a decent idea of how the next layer of his customized [Nine Reincarnations Manual]should look. The only thing holding him back was a lacking understanding of how souls worked in the C-grade and beyond. He didnʼt want to transform his Soul Cores in a way that would hamper his breakthrough into Monarchy.

In fact, Zac planned on doing the opposite. With his Soul Aperture already overlapping with the proto-space of his future Inner World, Zac planned on fully integrating the two like a Monarch would. With the relocation of his soul already in place, thereʼd be one fewer thing to worry about during his C-grade breakthrough.

Hours turned into days as Zac soaked up the knowledge like a sponge. Being stuffed full of information by the Unity Library had by no means sated his thirst for more. On the contrary, it had ignited a flame of scholarly passion. Ultimately, Ultomʼs enlightenment was a shortcut that couldnʼt and shouldnʼt be relied on forever. Meanwhile, gaining new knowledge was never a waste of time. A seemingly irrelevant piece of information could very well be what solved a tricky bottleneck down the road.

To speed up the process, Zac used himself as a lab rat. A number of changes began to appear inside his Quantum Space. First, the orbits of the two Soul Cores gradually adjusted themselves to more closely match the trajectories of Fuxiʼs grand array. From simple to complex to simple again, the previously set trajectories gained countless permutations.

That wasnʼt the only change. The Grand Unity Library had opened Zacʼs eyes to countless possibilities, and with it, Zacʼs ambitions had grown. The first thing that struck him was a fundamental question related to the [Nine Reincarnations Manual]: were the array disks even necessary to cultivate the method? They were too awkward to deal with for Zacʼs taste.

The array disks occupied his hands when cultivating, making it harder to practice his other methods at the same time. If they were damaged, he couldnʼt cultivate without getting his hands on replacements. Finding the materials and craftsmen capable of refining the specific arrays was already quite difficult, and it would only get harder as time passed.

It turned out that the answer was no. The arrays could be discarded—provided that you had a suitable replacement. And Zac had just the thing: his Cosmic Core.

Soon enough, the Soul Cores released streams of Mental Energy that poured into his Cosmic Core. Life-attuned tendrils created by his Evolutionary Core entered the life-attuned pathways, burrowing deeper and deeper until they reached the Core Nucleus. From there, they found their way out the opposite side.

Instead of returning from where they came, the streams Life-attuned Mental Energy settled in the swirling nebula surrounding his Inexorable Soul Core. Simultaneously, streams of Miasmic Mental Energy poured toward the Evolutionary Core.

This was a mutually beneficial change that didnʼt just speed up the attunement of his Soul Cores, it continuously washed his Cosmic Core in the spirituality of his Daos. It was also a passive form of cultivation that could be kept going around the clock. Naturally, the gains were minuscule compared to actively channeling [Nine Reincarnations Manual], but the benefits would stack up over time.

Zac still needed to figure out the optimal routes for actively cultivating the Soul Nurturing Manual without risking damage to his Cosmic Core, but it was simply a matter of trial and error. With every imperfection he pinpointed, he came one step closer to the correct answer.

Whenever Zacʼs head felt stuffy, he put down the soul-related tomes and studied something else. He usually ended up reading biographies of alumni and general explanations surrounding Monarchy. These books were located on the seventh floor and were only accessible to Peak Hegemons. What Zac found was both comforting and troubling.

The complex blueprints of Cosmic Cores tested oneʼs grasp of energy and Dao, and how oneʼs own path could be explained through fractals and natural patterns that made up the fabric of the universe. The blueprint for Inner Worlds, if one could call it that, was an internalization of this system.

The way Cultivators did this was simply by practicing according to their manuals. By the time they assaulted Monarchy, their Cosmic Cores would be perfectly aligned with their Dao, and the next step would be a natural transition. There was no new blueprint for them to create. So long as they fully understood the concepts behind their core and the nature of the Daos, drawing energy from the Cosmic Sea would be no different than breathing.

Nevertheless, this understanding was something that eluded the vast majority of Hegemons until the day they died, especially those whoʼd blindly followed an established heritage. In addition, even with perfect comprehension, there were great risks involved when opening up oneʼs world. The smallest mistake when managing the enormous forces unleashed when detonating oneʼs core, or the vast torrents of energy provided by the Cosmic Sea, could trigger a complete spatial collapse.

When it came to comprehension, Zacʼs position was stellar. His path was built from scratch by his own hands through unrelenting effort and seizing opportunities. The problems came from the second half. His control over energy and Dao was nothing to write home about, to the point he was forced to fashion workarounds like his Dao Molds.

Most importantly, he had no cultivation manual to help him guide the energies into a stable world. The scriptures of the Hollow Court provided little guidance in this regard. Zac had scoured the library for nearly a week, and heʼd found no mention of ancient mortal cultivators. At most, there were some biographies of untalented cultivators who succeeded through unorthodox means.

There was one cultivator of Ascension Gate who sprouted a powerful Spiritual Plant inside his Cosmic Core. Since it was growing inside the cultivatorʼs body, the flowerʼs spirituality became perfectly aligned. Through ceaseless nurturing, the plant eventually caught up with its owner. Finally, they broke through to C-grade at the same time.

Their combined breakthroughs fused into a single world, and the cultivator consumed the flower to successfully make the Inner World solely his. However, heʼd come awfully close to having his soul erased by the flower despite erecting many safeguards. A few more cultivators had succeeded through the methods mentioned by Tavza; seizing the foundations of others or reforging Natural Treasures into false inner worlds.

However, such paths were ultimately shortcuts, and Zac found no mention of these types of Monarchs progressing beyond Early C-grade. Most likely, mortals faced the same issue. Their Inner Worlds werenʼt true spiritual realms, lacking the capacity to grow over time.

Nevertheless, Zac didnʼt lose heart. His eyes gleamed as he dove back into the soul-nurturing tomes. A plan was taking shape, one directly connected to his work on [Nine Reincarnations Manual]. Zac had long since come to terms with never becoming a true cultivator. That didnʼt mean it was impossible to replicate the role of their cultivation manuals. Better yet, heʼd already laid the groundwork without realizing it.

The strength of [Void Emperor Apotheosis] was directly connected to the three pillars—Soul, Body, and Heart. The stronger they grew, and the better they harmonized, the greater the synergistic pull from the Cosmos.

What would happen if each pillar were the equivalent of a Monarchʼs? Would [Void Emperor Apotheosis] really be any worse than a cultivation manual at that point?